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8.6 this morning
I forgot to eat much yesterday because I was taking photos of butterflies in my garden.
There is usually one day a year I have hundreds of butterflies in my garden.
Usually mostly Peacock butterflies and Whites.
This year excelled itself. I had a hundred or more Peacock butterflies, dozens and dozens of Red Admirals (maybe more than the Peacock butterflies). I had at least one Painted Lady, and the biggest surprise was a few dozen Commas.
There were more different butterflies including some Whites.
It was a breezy day, so it was hard to get good photos. I probably took over a thousand photos with iPad and phone. I was trying to get them dancing in the sky, but they got out of the photo before the iPad took the photo. So about 300 photos were just blue sky. I got a few of them flying in the sky. The silhouettes were very impressive but I wasn't quick enough!
I managed to get a few photos with one just flying, the others escaped out of frame.
There were three different species of butterfly sharing a Buddleia flower head, but each time I managed to get iPad focused on it, two had flown off!
I have never seen so many Comma's at any one time. Usually I see one or two, if I am lucky.
Every year for one sunny day, maybe for a few more days, I always get dozens and dozens of Peacock butterflies, clouds of them. But I have never seen dozens and dozens of Red Admirals in one go, like I did this afternoon. And never so many Commas flying at one time.
However I have had clouds of white butterflies some years ago. The caterpillars had eaten nearly all my Kale I was growing. I left them be. And it as a wonderful morning in my garden when all the butterflies hatched out. It was magical. The kale regrew for winter, so I still got some kale that year.
I do have a couple of large beds of nettles. I encourage them. I don't know if that is the reason for all my butterflies each year. I also encourage my wild garden (the neighbours don't like it, one even came one year with his chain saw saying he would raze it to the ground and wouldn't that be nice and he had some weed killer to kill the nettles, he cannot see the nettles from the street, he has to look over the wall or through the slats on the fence...I won't say what I said to him...it was not polite...).
These were only the butterflies in the back garden I photographed. There were more on the Buddleia in the front garden.
I love my wildlife garden.
By the way, I have hundreds of bees and droneflies, and Ichneumonid wasps (you probably don't want the details of what they do, but they are vital for pest control and other stuff), the list goes on of all the flying insects...
There would be no shortage of butterflies and everything else if people at least put a part of their garden over for wildlife.
There is no shortage of sparrows or dunnocks either. Every morning I get a flock of long tailed t*ts (I hope that star will stop it from being all stars), I could go on and on.
Chainsaw man has a concrete jungle front and back and half a dozen pathetic bedraggled roses in pots, and he wonders where the wildlife has gone...
Had to reduce the files a lot to get them on here. But it gives you an idea of how many butterflies.
These were all taken on my iPad.
>^..^<
